year 12 involvement in holocaust educational trust programme
"A vivid and impactful experience": Year 12 Sohana on her participation in this invaluable opportunity
I hope we all actively choose to stand against dehumanisation and any discrimination and racism that we see or hear.
Two of our Year 12 students, Sohana and Samiya, who both study A Level History at UGS, were recently selected to take part in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz programme, and visited Poland as part of the experience.
It was a privilege for them to participate, and Sohana here gives her account:
Over the past few months, I have had the opportunity to take part in the Lessons from Auschwitz programme. This was set up by the Holocaust Educational Trust and its aim is to educate younger generations about the Holocaust via interactive online tasks, webinars and a one-day trip to Poland with around 2-8 students from multiple colleges/sixth forms in their region, and it has been running now for several years.
We were tasked with completing online courses before the trip to Poland, and these raised awareness about how the Jewish population lived their daily lives, and of how simply citing statistics makes it hard to fully comprehend the reality and scale of the genocide.
Once in Poland, we visited Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Oswiecim, a town only 3km away from the concentration camps.
An ongoing project that I learnt a lot more about was the Book of Names, which aims to include every single name of the 6 million Jewish people who lost their lives in the Holocaust.
There are currently still 1.2 million names missing.
Later we went to Auschwitz-Birkenau where most of the complex is outside, as it was an extermination camp more than a concentration camp.
Whilst I was there, the main feeling I had was one of loneliness, due to the vast size of the complex. This place served to make us more deeply reflect on what the conditions would have been like for the victims.
After the trip, I had the opportunity to hear a first-hand account from a survivor of the Holocaust as a final part of the programme. He mentioned how he was taken to the ghettos and put on a starvation diet before being taken to a concentration camp, where he was forced to do manual labour.
Again, this provided a deep and moving insight into how victims and survivors alike would have felt when going through the Holocaust.
Overall, this entire experience has given me new knowledge and thus a deeper understanding of the Holocaust by allowing me to experience it in a more vivid and impactful way than I had before.
I hope that we all actively choose to stand against dehumanisation and any discrimination or racism that we see and hear.
Report and photographs by Sohana 12T
If you would like to find out any further information about the Holocaust or be involved in one of their next Lessons from Auschwitz programmes, please visit: